Maybe you could just go inside, buy something, and ask if you can tuck in behind the station for the night, with a promise to leave early in the morning.
It was a quirky little gas station / convenience store—its three main features spilling carefully cultivated color and kitsch onto the large asphalt property they seem to have been plopped in the middle of, like an oasis for 1950s cravers. A single old-school pump with flip number display and a large jauntily angled sign attesting to its functionality stood in front of a white-washed concrete tank holder. The small store’s arched awning entrance was dotted with similar signage and replete with flowering plants, on the arch itself, in pots lining the walkway, on shelving against the building—effulgently drooping yellow trumpets, pots of delicate pink roses, crimson and sapphire nasturtium, fuchsia-belled evening primroses. The knickknack feature in front boasted wooden stumps, a tin cat, various owl and angel figurines, and a carved plumpish-looking Lady Liberty raising her torch to traffic.
I wouldn’t see these details, though, until the next day. For now, I knew the place seemed funky; a bright green bike lane striped the single main road of the town it skirted (bespeaking recent grant funding and evoking in me—having ridden the sometimes shoulderless Oregon coast weeks earlier—a wave of kinship); and darkness was fast approaching. I’d driven down several side roads and come up with zilch for my first night of “stealth” camping (not in a friend’s driveway or paid spot).
Luxuriating in blackberry-lined paths and the ancient giants of Redwood State Park, I’d enjoyed a certainty throughout the day that I would find just the spot. Now I felt less sure.
Then I recognized something in this desire to find the “safe” route, to give up. It was fear. But it wasn’t really the fear it was cloaked in—of ill-intentioned people, upset rangers or police officers, or wildlife (the AM station a road sign had prompted me to tune into warned of 1,200-pound elk that sometimes charge with no reason). Those things were the sheep’s clothing. The wolf was success—moving toward the power of self-actualization. I didn’t think then of the words of Marianne Williamson, often attributed to the Dalai Lama. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
What you want, I told myself, is to boldly be who you want to be. And the only way toward boldness is to boldly move forward. The only way to make something a thing you do easily is to do it.
It was, as they are, a lesson made easier by practice—and by failure. How many times has the fear of asking clearly for what I want or of stepping vigorously down an as yet unwalked path thwarted me?
Why is it that shrinking can feel so tempting, wilting so “safe”? What messages and from what sources have urged the eschewing of flagrant flourishing? To balk at stepping into our own power—which I believe is simply becoming fully unabashedly ourselves?
Not long after I’d pointed my van southward once more, I saw a small sign for the old highway 101. I’d noted it as a possibility on the map earlier in the day. From the moment I turned onto the narrow, pitted, treelined road, I knew it was what I’d been holding out for. I backed into the pullout just in time to watch the orange yolky sun sink into a shimmering blue-black ocean through a window in the wall of brambles, soft creamy bishop’s flowers, and brushy pink spear thistle alongside my home for the night.
***
In the morning, after a breakfast of summer squash, mushrooms, and fried eggs, I would construct my van shower of PVC pipe and shower curtains and enjoy another first—my first outdoor shower—amid hundreds of bright blue dragonflies. And in the week to come, there would be more—first dinner guest, first city camping, first rousting by a police officer.
#vanlife